"Apparent Pessimism" — Review of "Lapidarium V"

Author: Mariusz Czubaj. Source: Polityka, No. 46/2002. Date of publication: 2002.

It is impossible to say or write anything about the contemporary world that would be lasting, solid, and certain — says Ryszard Kapuściński in Lapidarium V, and perhaps this explains the conciseness and often aphoristic form of the collected notes.

The successive Lapidaria and Kapuściński’s reportage books complement each other. Where in his now-classic books — The Emperor or The Soccer War — the reporter showed one flashpoint on the political-social map and brought it closer from various angles, the notes in the Lapidaria are dispersed and can concern almost anything: impressions from a given lecture, reading, childhood memories from Polesie, scenes observed equally well in a Warsaw hospital and an exclusive restaurant in Mexico.

Despite this formula, the Lapidaria have their own internal order. Beyond doubt the main thread, taken up in all parts, is the question of globalisation. Kapuściński as few others sees that this process has not only an economic dimension. For him globalisation has above all a social and cultural dimension: it generates new inequalities, ultimately dissolves the individual leaving no room for the person, calls into life new forms of social pressure — the dictatorship of time, of fashion, of consumption, of credentials. If one adds to this the question of unequal access to education, which today constitutes the fundamental civilisational barrier, and the issue — clearly taken up in Lapidarium V — of Polish provincialism and the strange dizziness with which his compatriots have seized upon freedom, then it might seem that Ryszard Kapuściński has written a pessimistic, not to say gloomy, book. Yet it is otherwise. In Lapidarium V we find this thought as well: that the best path to knowing the world leads through making friends with it.

For we have indeed lived to see times without armed conflicts on a world scale. To the terrorists’ attack on New York our master of reportage devotes only a mention, correctly it seems, since the attack should be seen in the context of globalisation itself and of the associated clash of civilisations. Before our eyes, the author says, Third World countries have emancipated themselves; the contemporary tendency is unceasing progress and the world’s expansion, and democracy today is the watchword, the ambition, the prevailing model. Perhaps therefore it really is worth taking a liking to this world. And it is certainly worth understanding and describing it, as Ryszard Kapuściński does. Such description, important in the tradition of Polish humanist scholarship (one need only recall Florian Znaniecki’s Ludzie teraźniejsi a cywilizacja przyszłości or Jan Strzelecki’s Niepokoje amerykańskie), certainly also allows one to see horizons rising above the domestic province and backwater.

Ryszard Kapuściński, Lapidarium V, Czytelnik, Warsaw 2002, p. 128.